Howl's Moving Castle (2005) - DVD

by Walter Chaw I've never liked it much when the
Japanese are drawn to Victoriana, finding parallels as they sometimes
seem to between that reserved, sexually-repressive culture and their
own, because it most often results in garbage like Katsuhiro Ôtomo's
exhausting Steamboy and now master Hayao Miyazaki's
disappointing Howl's Moving Castle. Slow, not
terribly interested in lore or internal logic, and fatally hamstrung by
the choice of actors like Billy Crystal and a zombified Emily Mortimer
to voice its American dub, it's a regression for Miyazaki from his last
two films (Princess Mononokeand
Spirited Away) in almost
every sense, starting with his decision to have a lonely young woman as
the central character in place of the prepubescent little girls front
and centre in most of his masterpieces (the last two films, Kiki's
Delivery Service, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,
and My Neighbor Totoro) and ending with a gross
simplification of his usually complex themes of confidence and
actualization into a colourless, flavourless drone about the
hard-to-dispute badness of war.

Exactly as
tedious as Steamboy, then, and covering exactly the
same ground, Howl's Moving Castle shares with
Ôtomo's film, too, a giant steam-powered ball as its central image,
encapsulating a vision of Victorian England in a Frankenstein's
yin/yang clattering along inexorably like the Industrial Revolution
while gorgeous impressionistic watercolour towns are polluted by coal
smoke from a fleet of trains burning through the forests at night.
Pretty-boy wizard Howl (voiced by Christian Bale, who is not, as it
happens, known for his vocal expressiveness) lives in the film's
titular ball--itself perched atop four chicken legs like a mechanized
extrapolation of the Russian Baba Yaga myth (married to Harlan
Ellison's "Shoppe Keeper" short story), eternally wandering a
mist-shrouded wasteland as silly townsfolk speculate that he's out to
eat the hearts of pretty women. Hatmaker Sophie (Emily Mortimer as a
young woman, Jean Simmons as the crone version) remarks sardonically
that Howl's predilection for fine young things leaves her, a plain
Jane, safe from his attentions, yet Howl saves her early on from the
unwelcome lascivious attentions of a pair of leering Bobbies. All the
peripheral men in the film are sexually aggressive wolves or pre-sexual
cubs (a witch's retinue is composed entirely of fey little boys) and
all the peripheral women are treacherous bimbos. But there're no sexual
politics in the film, not even in the multiple suggestions that the
main character is gay. (Sophie notes that Howl in disguise is most
likely one of the above-mentioned bimbos.) It's the white elephant in a
room decorated with them.

And that's
the problem with Howl's Moving Castle: it's a
nonsensical film that demands its audience impose sense on it. After
Sophie is arbitrarily turned into a 90-year-old woman by the arbitrary
Witch of the Wastes (Lauren Bacall, typecast), she spends the rest of
her time alternating personas with no explanation as to what we
perceive, what Sophie perceives, and what her cohorts perceive. Is her
change meant to represent the Miyazakian theme of female actualization?
Or is there some other lore-embedded explanation that would do a better
job of grounding the film in its own mythology? Worse is the recurring
figure of a scarecrow (and the overtures to The Wizard of Oz
are as many as they are superficial) that turns out to be a missing
prince from the next kingdom over--the revelation of which isn't a
spoiler in any way because not only were we not told there's a next
kingdom over, we also weren't aware that a prince was missing.
Meanwhile, there's a war going on, complete with giant bio-mechanical
bombers and fire-lit horizons--a war in which Howl refuses to
participate even though he leaves his castle every night to, well,
participate in it. The character isn't conflicted so much as the
narrative is confused--it takes almost the whole of the film to
identify the war zone as a contemporary plane rather than some kind of
cautionary vision of the future or another dimension. The picture's
beautiful, no question, and I do wonder if there's something
irretrievably lost in the translation (the film grossed over $200
million dollars in tiny Japan last year where it was, admittedly, Billy
Crystal-free). In this incarnation, however, Howl's Moving
Castle is easily the biggest let-down of the year so far. Originally
published: June 17, 2005.

THE DVDby Bill Chambers Disney presents Howl's Moving Castle
on DVD
in a 1.88:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. Tech-savvy anime buffs have
lamented this presentation ever since its release, as the Mouse House
took one step forward and one step back in dispensing with the
controversial windowboxing of its Japanese counterpart while
simultaneously introducing edge-enhancement into an
otherwise-immaculate image. Because Hayao Miyazaki's animation consists
of line drawings, this isn't just noticeable--it's completely
redundant: the illusion of sharpness comes built-in. The accompanying
Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, in similarly-mixed English and Japanese
flavours, is more aggressive/expansive than we've been conditioned to
expect from Ghibli titles, particularly whenever the titular castle is
in transport.

The
characteristically U.S.-skewing extras include one of the sleeker
entries in the "Behind the Microphone" sweepstakes (9 mins.); a
7-minute "Interview with Pete Docter" conducted for Japanese television
(the questions are asked in Japanese, but Docter helpfully paraphrases
them at the start of his answers) wherein the director of the Stateside
dub avows a preference for watching foreign films in their native
tongue and touches on the interesting dilemma of the effeminate wizard
archetype Howl represents having no correlative in American culture;
and "Hello Mr. Lasseter: Hayao Miyazaki Visits Pixar" (16 mins.), in
which Miyazaki pays a surprise visit to his would-be protégé at
Lasseter's workplace, where he gifts him with a coveted Cat-bus
installation and accompanies him to the in-house premiere of the
English-language Howl's Moving Castle. Though a
heart-warming
piece, this final segment is ultimately hamstrung by the fact that we
not only witness these events unfold but also have to listen to
Lasseter recap them twice, first for Pixar staffers at the screening,
then for a Japanese interviewer. A 12-minute block of Howl's
Moving Castle TV spots and trailers plus sneak peeks at
Disney's other Studio Ghibli acquisitions, The Little Mermaid,
Cars, Chicken
Little, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe, and Airbuddies
round out the first platter of this 2-disc set. The second DVD contains
the de rigueur option to view Howl's
Moving Castle in storyboard form. Originally published: April 25,
2006.

Comments

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We are told early on there's a neighboring kingdom with a missing prince; that's the reason for the war. Granted, the explanation is blink-and-you-missed-it, and not much else in the movie makes sense (an issue of editing and translation?) but for trippy imagery, this is top shelf Miyazaki. Howl isn't gay so much as based on Michael Jackson, but draw your conclusions there.